Selling Dog Meat, While Hanging a Goat Head: The Myanmar Military’s Approach to Peace Negotiation

By: Ye Myo Hein

May 18, 2026

A general abruptly rose from his chair and snapped harshly at one of the ethnic minority resistance leaders in the room: “Hey, you, what forces or weapons of any strength do you actually have to make such a bold claim in this meeting?” The room fell into stunned silence at the words. This outburst occurred during a negotiation session of the 2017 peace conference, where the author was present as a technical advisor.

Such hostile words have no place in a peace negotiation. Yet for the Myanmar military, little is off limits. The general’s insult toward a negotiating partner revealed the military’s deeper attitude toward the process itself. The logic behind the outburst was simple: if you do not possess the force or weaponry to rival the military, you have no right to speak. In many ways, this mentality foreshadowed the country’s politics following the 2021 coup.

The Myanmar military, an institution that has long brutalized the nation through the power of its weapons, ultimately believes that force is everything. It has therefore never regarded peace talks as a genuine political process to resolve the conflicts that have plagued the country since independence. Instead, it treats them as platforms to exploit the arms differential and to intimidate rivals into submission on the military’s terms. This playbook has driven other stakeholders, and now even much of the general public, to conclude that the only way to speak to the generals is through military strength.

Once again, Min Aung Hlaing’s regime has invited ethnic armed organizations (EAOs) to resume peace talks within a hundred days of his inauguration as junta president. Some in the international community have gullibly welcomed the move as a sign of reform. In reality, the invitation is nothing new; it is merely an attempt to resuscitate a peace process the military itself dismantled through its coup. It is unlikely to resolve Myanmar’s protracted conflicts or restore stability amid escalating violence. A peace process led by the military and its generals is a contradiction in terms and is doomed from the outset.

Myanmar military officers. Licensed under Creative Commons.

The Military’s Approach to "Peace"

A year after seizing power in 1962, the military coup council invited armed insurgent groups to a peace parley. The invitation statement stressed that the talks would proceed “without preconditions,” a phrase echoed in Min Aung Hlaing’s recent call for talks. As the military’s first major peace initiative, the offer drew in a broad spectrum of political and ethnic resistance groups.

Before the '62 coup, military leaders had viewed negotiation as a sign of weakness and compromise as a form of defeat. When Prime Minister U Nu granted amnesty to rebel groups in 1958 as part of a peace initiative, the military regarded the move as harmful to its institutional interests. Some military officers even argued that it was one of several factors behind the military’s decision to pressure the U Nu administration into transferring power to the caretaker administration led by General Ne Win. When the civilian government convened a federal conference to seek a political solution to the growing ethnic crisis and to address underlying grievances that still drive today’s civil war, the military staged a coup under the pretext that federal negotiations would lead to the disintegration of the Union.

Against this backdrop, the military’s sudden call for peace talks in 1963 marked a striking departure from its earlier posture and generated interest among insurgent groups eager to see whether the regime had genuinely altered its approach. In reality, the military had changed little. The initiative was a political spectacle, not a genuine effort at negotiation. The military had no intention of engaging in compromise. Nai Shwe Kyin, who participated in the talks as a leader of a Mon armed group, later remarked that the negotiations failed because the military “only wanted us to surrender”. His observation captured the essence of the military’s approach to negotiation from then on: demanding submission rather than seeking compromise.

In the early 1980s, the government led by military dictator General Ne Win and a circle of retired generals once again attempted to open peace talks, this time with two of the country’s most formidable insurgent forces: the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Communist Party of Burma (CPB). The initiative followed a broad amnesty announcement for insurgents and was presented as another effort toward national reconciliation. Yet, much like the 1963 talks, the negotiations quickly ran aground.

The core problem remained unchanged. The regime viewed peace processes not as a negotiation requiring compromise, but as a platform for pressuring the opposition into submission. As longtime Burma observer Bertil Lintner noted in his seminal work, Burma in Revolt, the Ne Win government offered little beyond "rehabilitation programs" and material inducements, refusing to seriously consider political concessions or structural reforms that might help end the country’s cycles of violence.

The generals approached negotiations with little understanding of power-sharing, compromise, or political accommodation. Instead, they expected their adversaries to surrender and accept the military’s terms. In practice, the only real compromise the regime was prepared to offer came in the form of economic concessions. Groups or commanders that accepted the military’s arrangements were absorbed into its crony business networks , border trade agreements, and illicit economies. Insurgents became ensnared in the military’s commercial interests and patronage system.

This pattern became particularly evident in the ceasefire deals struck with EAOs during the 1990s. These arrangements did not emerge from genuine political negotiations and contained virtually no political agreement. The junta itself openly declared that since the military is not a political organization, it did not engage in political negotiations. The ceasefires were aimed at neutralizing and containing the EAOs through a combination of territorial concessions, business incentives, and patronage benefits under military supervision.

Politics of Force

During the peace process that developed after 2010, the military was the principal impediment to progress. Its staunch refusal to permit the three Northern Alliance groups, the Arakan Army (AA), the Ta’ang National Liberation Army (TNLA), and the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), to sign the Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement contributed to an incomplete nationwide ceasefire process and the continuation of intense conflict.

One reason the military dismissed these groups was its belief that they were weak, minor armed forces that could be defeated militarily. They were consider unworthy of inclusion in the peace process. Faced with exclusion and continued military pressure, the groups saw little alternative but to strengthen their armed capabilities.

Today, they have evolved into three of the most powerful forces, controlling large swaths of territory. At the very moment when the military can no longer ignore them, the junta is only capable of achieving short-term ceasefires through Chinese coercion. Meaningful political negotiations that would incorporate these groups into the junta’s political roadmap are virtually impossible.

The case of the Arakan Army (AA) is perhaps the clearest. Beyond excluding the group from the peace process, the military repeatedly refused to negotiate with the AA, branding it a terrorist organization. Yet the tactic of avoiding political dialogue by labeling opponents as “terrorists” or “illegal organizations” is hardly new in the history of the Myanmar military. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, while the population was suffering under a public health crisis, the military escalated its offensives in Rakhine State rather than pursuing negotiations. Only after coming under significant military pressure did the junta engage in talks with the AA. By then, however, the balance of power had already shifted dramatically. The AA has since emerged as the dominant force across much of Rakhine State, controlling nearly the entire territory. Having gained substantial military and political leverage, it is no longer inclined to be drawn into the military’s old theatrics of peace negotiations.

It is hardly surprising that the peace process of the 2010s produced little. The military did not enter the process to help the country achieve peace and stability, but rather to project force, intimidate, and at times insult other stakeholders. Its delegates came not as peace representatives, but more like soldiers entering a battlefield.

According to one officer, military delegates gathered every morning to receive instructions from senior commanders on what they should to say during the negotiations. In reality, there was little need to send such a large cadre of officers to the talks, since they just repeated talking points dictated by their superiors. The conspicuous presence of rows of officers in green uniforms were primarily intended as a display of force. The insulting outburst by the general mentioned above was only one among many such incidents. Many of these behaviors appeared deliberately calculated to intimidate other participants and undermine the peace process itself.

The protracted talks ultimately ended without producing any meaningful political change, and in 2021, the military dismantled the entire process through its ill-fated coup. Drawing lessons from these experiences, many EAOs came to believe that they could only talk with the military once they possessed sufficient military strength. After the collapse of the 1981 peace talks, Brang Seng, the chairman of the Kachin Independence Army (KIA), similarly lamented that negotiations would fail as long as they entered them from a position of weakness.

The 2021 coup affirmed this reality for the public. Across the country, ordinary people sitting inside their own homes were confronted by armed soldiers shouting threats and insults such as, “Those who dare to die, come out.” Many people, especially among the younger generation, came to believe that they had no option but to take up arms against a military that understands only the language of force. This is how the country has become trapped in a spiral of endless war.

The Return of a Failed Peace Formula

After appointing himself president of the new junta regime, Min Aung Hlaing once again called for the resumption of peace talks. In reality, however, the proposal contains no political offer. Instead, it merely repeats the same old tactic, echoing the familiar mantra of “talks without preconditions” first invoked by the military coup regime in 1963. To anyone with even a basic understanding of the military’s approach to negotiation and the history of Myanmar’s peace process, it is clear that the regime’s current initiative will not resolve the country’s protracted conflicts or restore stability.

The regime does not intend to seek peace or stability; it seeks only to prolong its grip on power. What it aims to revive is the peace process and Nationwide Ceasefire Agreement (NCA) framework that it dismantled through the 2021 coup, within the confines of the military-drafted 2008 Constitution. At the same time, it will continue military offensives and aerial bombardments on civilian targets to pressure resistance groups into joining the talks. It will employ its familiar divide-and-rule tactics as well, attempting to divide EAOs through bilateral engagement, selective incentives, and political maneuvering designed to pull individual groups into the process.

During negotiations, the regime will return to its old playbook of intimidating rivals into submission and steering talks toward outcomes dictated by the military’s own agenda. Simultaneously, it will seek to present itself to the international community as a legitimate government pursuing dialogue to restore stability. Of course, this is not a genuine peace initiative, but another attempt to preserve military domination under the guise of negotiation.

When the coup regime called for a peace parley in 1963, rebel groups aptly described the initiative as “selling dog meat while hanging a goat’s head,” a striking metaphor exposing what they saw as the regime’s deceptive and fraudulent approach to peace. Despite recognizing the deception, many resistance groups have found themselves drawn into the military’s trap time and again.

As one EAO leader told the author, “There is an English proverb: ‘Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.’ But we have already been fooled too many times. At this point, we no longer know where the shame lies in continuing to believe them. But this time, we do not want to be deceived again.”